Category Archives: UK

Standard remove controversial mosque poll

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Evening Standard have removed a controversial poll from their ThisisLondon website after London Mayor Ken Livingstone highlighted an email an campaign to influence the outcome.

The poll asked readers to vote whether or not they were in favour of the Mayor spending £100 million of public money on a new Mosque in East London however Mr Livingstone has repeatedly denied any public funds would be spent on the project.

Yesterday Mr Livingstone said his office has been alerted to a series of emails being sent which make what he calls “a series of false claims about the mosque proposals in such a way as to stir up communal hatred” leading him to write to Veronica Wadley, Editor of the Evening Standard.

In his letter the Mayor asked Ms Wadley to “clarify to readers and visitors to the website that the poll will be disregarded as totally unrepresentative due to the attempt to influence its outcome through untrue mass emails likely to damage community relations in London.”

In response the Standard’s Managing Editor, Doug Willis, told Mr Livingstone the poll had been “published…last September. As is normal with daily polls, it remains on the website. We have today added a sentence to the website saying that since publication of the original poll and article, proposals for this mosque have been revised.”

Mayor Watch, 5 April 2007

No.10 website carries threats of violence against Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The extreme right have threatened violence against Muslims on Downing Street’s website in a protest over a proposed Mosque. The British National Party and other neo-Nazi groups are supporting a petition on No.10’s website which warns, ominously, of “terrible violence and suffering” should the so-called mega mosque go ahead. This is certain to be taken as a warning that physical violence could be unleashed against Muslims unless the dissenters get their way and defeat plans to build a mosque on the Olympic site in Stratford, east London.

Blink is encouraging readers to complain to No.10 over the reference to “terrible violence and suffering” if the mosque is built. Please email webmaster@pmo.gov.uk and ask for these words to be removed or failing that, the whole petition taken off line

BLINK, 5 April 2007

Four years in Guantánamo – the man who said no to MI5

Posted on by Bob Pitt

guantanamo-bayBritish resident Jamil el-Banna, 44, knew Abu Qatada, a cleric accused of being al-Qaida’s spiritual leader in Europe.

In 2002 Mr Banna, a father of five from London, was seized by the CIA and secretly flown to Guantánamo Bay, after MI5 wrongly told the Americans that his travelling companion was carrying bomb parts on a business trip to Gambia.

On Friday, his companion, Bisher al-Rawi, was released without charge after four years in the US detention camp, after it emerged that he had helped MI5 keep track of Qatada. But Mr Banna’s incarceration in Cuba continues.

It has now emerged that only days before Mr Banna’s arrest, MI5 visited him at his home and attempted to recruit him as an informer, with the lure of a new identity, relocation and money. The Guardian has obtained this MI5 document in which the intelligence officer details, in his own words, that encounter.

Guardian, 4 April 2007

Parties unite in opposition to BNP as poll looms

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Politicians from all parties have put their differences aside in a bid to oppose the far-right British National Party. Sitting Assembly Members abandoned their campaigning and joined candidates and community members to discuss the BNP. The group is putting up a record 20 candidates in the National Assembly election, with the most high profile bid for power coming from leader Nick Griffin in the South Wales West constituency.

At a meeting in the Glamorgan Muslim Community Centre, Aberkenfig, near Bridgend, on Saturday, politicians including Environment Minister and Bridgend AM Carwyn Jones and Plaid Cymru candidate Bethan Jenkins pledged their commitment to tackling discrimination against ethnic minorities.

The Bridgend Unite Against Fascism Group, which organised the gathering, believes the BNP is a racist party which poses a threat to democracy and freedom. Unite spokesman Jeff Hurford said: “The highlight of the day was being able to get all of the parties together and a commitment to showing unity against the BNP. This all bodes well for future co-operation between the parties ahead of next year’s council elections.”

icWales, 4 April 2007

Terrorists – coming to a school near you

Posted on by Bob Pitt

School bus“Authorities fear the school massacre that shook Russia a few years ago may be a dress rehearsal for what al-Qaida plans to do in America – only on a grander scale, launching multiple school attacks simultaneously across the country…. The FBI and Homeland Security Department last month distributed a bulletin to law enforcement across the country warning that Muslims with ‘ties to extremist groups’ are signing up to be school bus drivers….

“‘The enemy is infiltrating us at all levels, and certainly school bus drivers are one area to look at,’ warned retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, president of an anti-terror consultancy Killology Research Group [sic] that trains the FBI and other law enforcement. ‘And how about high school, middle school and elementary school cafeteria workers? Janitors? Delivery people?’ Grossman says some school district security officials he works with have expressed concerns about some of the Muslim employees schools are hiring. ‘But no one dares profile them,’ he told WND.”

World Net Daily, 3 April 2007

Tell your Muslim friends: ‘Let our sailors go now’ – BNP call to MCB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Nazi scum“BNP leader Nick Griffin has today written to the Muslim Council of Britain, urging them to lend their support to the campaign for the release of the 15 Royal Navy hostages seized by Iran”, the British National Party announces.

BNP news article, 3 April 2007

We know the fascists are not exactly the brightest people around, but you’d have thought that even the knuckledraggers of the BNP might have noticed that the MCB have already done just that. See MCB press release, 1 April 2007

‘The enemy within’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tatchell No Islamic StateSunny Hundal takes issue with Inayat Bunglawala’s statement that Hizb ut-Tahrir are “a non-violent party and have every right to spread their ideas peacefully”.

Predictably, Hundal wins the approval of that other expert in self-promotion, Peter Tatchell, who comments:

“The political goals of Hizb ut-Tahrir are the Islamist equivalent of the BNP – only much worse. Why are there no anti-fascist campaigns against Hizb ut-Tahrir, just like there are anti-fascist campaigns against the BNP?”

Comment is Free, 1 April 2007

This illustrates very clearly how Tatchell’s Islamophobia has led him to lose all contact with reality.

The British National Party is a white supremacist organisation which, according to its own constitution, is “wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples” and aims to restore “the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948”.

HT, by contrast, is an organisation based on a small section of the Muslim community – a minority ethno-religious community who are in fact the primary victims of the BNP’s malevolent racism.

On these grounds alone, it should be obvious that equating the BNP and HT is an absurdity, never mind declaring that HT is “much worse” than the Nazi-inspired BNP.

The criticism to be made of HT’s members is that they have drawn mistaken conclusions about how racism and imperialism are to be resisted, which has led them to abstain from mainstream politics in Britain. This is why other Muslims have sought to engage in dialogue with HT.

Sunny Hundal condemns Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain for adopting this approach. Who exactly would gain if the MCB were to accept Hundal’s demands and break all relations with HT?

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